Chinatown

A terrible maze and center for opium trade and consumption in New Orleans, Chinatown is home to Tom Pickett, whom protagonist Charles ("Buddy") Bolden slashes as revenge for a tryst with his common-law wife. After Detective Webb questions Pickett in his fly-crawling flat, Pickett vanishes and no one knows his whereabouts. E. J. Bellocq once does a photo shoot in the opium dens.

The Cricket

Protagonist Charles ("Buddy") Bolden's broadsheet newspaper, The Cricket consists of whatever stories he hears from customers and hired "spiders," put down without editing. It runs 1899-1905, offering "stray facts, manic theories, and well-told lies," favoring lurid stories of broken marriages and musical and political gossip. It deals excessively with death, which terrifies Buddy. Returning from his two-year disappearance, Buddy reviews back copies and realizes that The Cricket is to a large degree his own diary.